davedm - 4:38 pm on Mar 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

@wingslevel - perhaps I was a little harsh there, but I do think it is in their interests to keep things as uncertain as possible for all but advertisers. I genuinely don't think they care - look at Google+, everyone knows nobody wants or needs it - but they persist in making it more and more prominent.

@petehall - I'm seeing exactly the same; can't see any rhyme or reason to the results that are showing up. Lots of instances where there many pages from the same site - and only one is really relevant.

There seem to be a lot of exact match domains at the top again; especially in local - search for "widgets" and you'll get the "widgets.com" homepage followed by a 7-pack whereas before you'd tend to see 2-3 deep pages from relevant sites. Weird.